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Panasonic's Blu-ray Recorder To Hit Market In July
lunarscape writes "Forbes is reporting that 'Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. on Wednesday unveiled what it calls the world's first DVD recorder that supports single-side, dual-layer Blu-ray Discs with a maximum capacity of 50 gigabytes.' It looks like Sony's own Blu-ray recorder will now have some competition."
Unknown host pong.
It's interesting that the first Blu-Ray recorders are being first marketed as standalone recorders, and there's no version for a computer yet. Usually, it's the other way around (CD/DVD)...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
for the moment anyway. The price tag, form factor and lack of HDTV will I think put most people off these. DVD is adequate for the masses and until something clearly better and more affordable comes these are just expensive gadgets.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Can we really trust these discs? I mean, the CD is a reliable digital support, it will tolerate alot of abuses. We all know that sometimes, a CD with lots and lots of scratches will work just fine. The DVD on the other hand, is alot more sensitive. I've had problems with dvd's where I could hardly see any scratches on the surface, and I've heard some other people complain about it as well. Maybe we're just dumb and don't know how to properly handle them, but still no one can deny that a DVD is alot more sensitive. If these guys says they pub 50gb on a single disk, I can only imagine how sensitive the damn thing will be. They should have some kind of enclosure, like the old 3.5" disks. Those were never reliable, but I can only imagine how much worse they'd be if they had the exposed disk.
I am a speak english. Do you not? - Saroto
Do you really want to download that ISO on even a T-1 Line? have bittorrent swamp your connection for a month?
Ouch... Maybe they'd have a cheapbytes disk...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The storage industry is always too far behind, IMHO. By the time this technology gets affordable, it'll catch the back end of it's usefulness. When tapes were out, I needed 4 or 5 tapes to get my stuff backed up. Then I switched to CD-R, then to DVD-R, now to hard drives. I have around 300 GB to back up, but I refuse to pay for an autoloader or something crazy. If the format held a terabyte, then sure, I'd consider it, but 50 GB = 10 movies. Also consider the cost of storage these days: as of right now, I'm seeing less than $0.50/gig for EIDE hard drives. Unless you're bringing gigabytes of data around with you in your pocket every day, you'd get more for your money with a cheap file server and a bunch of huge drives. As far as the consumer/home market goes, what takes up 50 gig? Are they really going to release all six Star Wars on one 50 GB DVD? Hells no! The only application I see for that is for "Season 1"-type packages, where you're getting 6 or 8 DVDs now anyway, but this technology will not be pervasive anytime soon.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Look for Sony to complete it's "merger" with BMG, throw the MGM movie library on the pile, and issue HDVDs (HDTV DVDs) for loading onto your Media Vaio, and taking with you on your PS-ultra, docking in your car for those long drives to Sony IMAX. Trailer spam to your Sony smartphone!
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make install -not war
A DVD-+R is under 100 bucks. I predict it'll be around 50 by the end of the year. Blanks are coming wayy down in price, almost on parity with CD-R (well, on parity with CD-R if you go gig for gig cost)
So just frickin buy one. Unless you need 50 gigs per disc, and are willing to pay the crazy prices for the drives and media.
In a couple years, when blu-ray is the $100 dollar solution with uber-cheap media, buy one of those.
If $100 dollars is too rich for your blood, you need another hobby.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I will wait for the HD-DVD format to come about. There are just too many people arguing over the next standard, and until it becomes a standard, I will wait. This is my standard response.
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
It's pretty bad when you have to buy 200 gb HDs and use them to backup your images and stick'em in the closet. There are better uses.
Not to be contentious, but these drives are going to start at what, $700-$800 for at least the first year they're out? Media's probably going to be a minimum $6-$10 per disc for the short to medium term.
When I see that USB drives are about $0.50/gig, I wouldn't really have a problem with buying hard drives for backup devices, and swapping them out when I need the images. You can store a LOT of pictures before you start to reach the price point of your blue-ray burner, and (I don't know how compatible blue ray dvd's are with red-ray tech) the images remain a lot more universally portable.
-Styopa
"I would not think that current DVD owners would burn multiple movies into 1 DVD backup."
Those of us that have entire seasons of Television shows might be interested. Depending on how easy it is to do, yadda yadda yadda. (Transcoding sucks!)
"Derp de derp."
Hmm, let's consider:
Backup method 1:
Lots of data, burned to several blueRAY DVDs. Backup takes hours, you have to swap, and using your system for other things while burning is likely to produce coasters. Price: $500 plus for a burner, plus an unknown amount for the media. The backups take up very little room, but must be treated as gentle you treat your cornea.
Backup method 2:
A cheap/old PC, equipped with a couple of big hard drives, hooked up through ethernet. Backup is reasonably fast, and you don't have to swap. I.e. you can do nightly backups without human intervention, and keep multiple levels of backup.
The backup media can take quite a bit of punishment, and at $.50 per gigabyte, even be mirrored for extra safety.
Unless you need to ship the things through mail or store them in tiny safe deposit boxes, I see no reason for using DVDs, blu-ray or otherwise, for data storage.
YMMV,
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*Art
One more media category that Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, etc. will need to find room for on their shelves, in among the DVD+RW and the DVD-R and the Music CD-Rs and the Data CD-RW's and the Type 4 DVD-RAM and the Type 2 DVD-RAM and the Type 1 DVD-RAM and the "printable-but-not-by-inkjet" DVD's and the "inkjet-printable" DVD's.
I wonder what category of media they will kick out in order to make room for it? And what devices will start to become effectively orphaned as once-easily-obtained media become increasingly hard to find?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Backup method 3:
Lots of data, the whole of the aforementioned 40 gig disk burned to a single Blu-ray disc. Backup takes a couple hours, but no big deal, as you kick it off before you go to bed. Price: $30 after rebate from Office Max for the cheap no-name burner, plus a couple bucks a disc. At pennies per gigabyte, you can make a hundred copies of your data and never worry about what happens if your dog sparky manages to chew on them. Time until this is feasible: about a year after the next-generation storage technology is released.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Let's see you carry a copy offsite!
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
another example of the fabulousness of gallium nitride (GaN) and its cousins in the III-nitride semiconductor material system
:P but at the end of the day as a geek i think blu-ray dvds are very very cool and i want to have them in my house ;)
gallium/aluminium/indium nitride (and their alloys) are the semiconductors that bring to you the blue/violet lasers being used to read/write the blu-ray discs
the wavelength of blue light is smaller than of red (red lasers are currently used for dvd/cd drives) and hence it has a finer resolution - that means, more data on the same size disc
only a few years ago gallium nitride technology was in its infancy - now, largely thanx to the hard work of Shuji Nakamura blue LEDs and lasers are making it into home electronics around the world! it really is an amazing to feat to have overcome the difficulties of developing this material into the fantastic devices today (see Shuji's book "The Blue Laser Diode: GaN Based Light Emitters and Lasers", 1997, for background into their development)
sure, most of us care little about how the technology gets to us, and bitch about the implementation - but let us think for a moment on the fact that we have it at all (and sure its expensive but a lot more money has gone into getting it to us)!
ok, so i'm a gan researcher and a little biased